


And You're Miles Away

by losingmymindtonight



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: College, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Homesickness, I'm projecting my own problems onto Peter again, Loneliness, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter goes to MIT, Phone Calls, Precious Peter Parker, Texting, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, spoiler alert: he's lonely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 19:46:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15956243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/losingmymindtonight/pseuds/losingmymindtonight
Summary: College is scary, even for teenage superheros.





	And You're Miles Away

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who started college? Me!  
> Guess who's been taking out her crushing homesickness on Peter Parker? Also me!  
> This is one of those projects that I wrote without the intention of finishing, or posting, but somehow it ended up here. So, if you're a fan of Peter being lonely and sad for about 3,000 words, you're about to have a fantastic time.

The second night in his dorm room was the worst.

The first night was bearable only because it hadn’t seemed real, not yet. It had felt like any minute, he’d wake from the illusion and he’d be back in his bed in Queens, smelling Aunt May’s breakfast and looking forward to an afternoon spent tinkering in the lab with Mister Stark.

It was nice to cling to the concept. Deceive himself into thinking that nothing had changed. That nothing _had_ to change.

On the second night, though? The fantasy felt too outlandish to uphold. This was his home now. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Flirting on the edge of Boston. A city, for sure, but not the right city. Not _his_ city. He’d left the cozy comfort of his and May’s just-big-enough apartment for _this_. Four slightly stained walls. A bare sink, a smudged mirror. A lofted bed and a chipped wooden desk.

An empty room. An empty room so, so far away from New York, from Queens, from the city he loved with all his heart.

So far away from the _people_ that he loved, too.

He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling panels that shifted precariously when he pushed against them, and felt the weight of his decision settle in every inch of his body.

He had wanted to leave, right? He’d wanted to run, to cement who he was in a place untouched by May or Tony or Ned. To grow in a garden of his own making.

This wasn’t what he’d wanted, though. This wasn’t what he’d signed up for.

Or, it was. It _was_. He just hadn’t realized how small he would feel. The crushing realization that he could never fill this room, this campus, this role. It would dwarf him and swallow him whole.

He didn’t want to be here. He was cold, and lonely, and the stupid stuffed elephant that May had given him was a poor substitute for the familiarity of May’s perfume or the strength of Tony’s chest.

And so on one of the first nights that Peter Parker was meant to be an adult, he cried himself to sleep like a child.

\--

Peter woke up and looked at his phone.

7:30 am. Monday. September 5th.

His first day of classes.

_Shit._

His eyes slid down to his notifications, nervousness wavering against a grin at the very first message.

TS: Good luck today, kiddo. Not that you need it. You’re gonna kick ass out there.

A new text buzzed in just as he had mustered the resolve to crawl out of bed.

TS: Remember to call me after.

He loitered against the edge of his desk, bare feet pressed against the cold linoleum floor. He spared a brief thought to how many others had been in this exact spot. How many students, unsure and lost, had stood in this room and faced the very same fears as him?

He typed out his message with slow fingers. He felt weighed down by significance.

PP: you know I will

TS: Oh, you better.

He glanced up, meeting his own eyes in the mirror.

He didn’t see an adult. He saw a child, scared and overwhelmed and biting off more than he could possibly hope to chew. A child, wavering on a thousand decisions that could make him or break him.

But children became adults, didn’t they? Now it was his turn. To be bigger, to do better. His turn to live, to learn, to _thrive_.

His turn to grow up, even if he wasn’t sure that he wanted to.

_I can do this._

_Right?_

\--

As it turned out, Peter _could_ do this.

At least, he was pretty sure that he could.

He practically skipped out of his last class, excitedly holding his phone up to his face as it rang once, twice-

“Kid!” Tony sounded about as excited as Peter felt. “How’d it go? Dazzle everyone with your brilliance?”

“It was _amazing_ , Mister Stark! Everyone in my classes is so smart. And, like, the professors _know_ we’re smart and they talk to us like they know it and I _love it_.”

“I knew you would.” He pictured Tony’s smile, adoring in a way that was reserved entirely for him. “World’s an ocean, kid, and you’re a shark.”

He laughed at the familiar analogy. “Everyone at MIT is a shark, Mister Stark. I’m not _that_ special.”

“You and I both know that that’s not true.”

His mind flashed to Spider-Man, and he felt a sudden pang of loss. He’d left the suit back home, at the Tower. For now, his vigilante alter ego was on standby.

“ _He_ doesn’t count, Mister Stark.”

“I’m not talking about the spandex.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Peter Parker, the most brilliant kid I’ve ever met. Jesus, squirt, get with the program.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

A shy smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “I- I just… well, you know.”

_I love you._

That’s what he had wanted to say. And he didn’t stop because he didn’t mean it.

He stopped because it meant too much. He didn’t know if he could say it without crying.

“Yeah, kid, I know.” There was a beat of silence, as if Tony was testing a dilemma of his own. “Right back at ya, Pete.”

\--

“Hey, are you busy?”

“Not at all, kiddo. What’s up?”

“I just,” Peter sniffled, “I just… wanted to talk to someone.”

“Oh, Peter.” Everything about Tony’s tone gentled. “You know you can always talk to me.”

“I know. That’s-That’s why I called.”

“Good. So, what’s up?”

“Dunno. Just sad.” He fiddled with the edge of his comforter. “Can you just… talk? About something? Until I fall asleep?”

“Well, I’m not a motormouth like you,” Tony paused in anticipation for Peter’s little laugh, “but I can do my best.”

He closed his eyes, letting a deep breath settle through his lungs. In, out. Listen to the gentle ramble of Tony’s voice. Cling to it like a lifeline. Let it be a tether to shore.

_You’re not all alone in a hollow dorm room. Tony’s right here. He’s here. You’re home._

He was mostly asleep when his mentor’s voice finally trailed off. He didn’t hang up the phone, though. Peter could still hear his soft breaths.

When he spoke again, his voice was colored with a weird kind of sadness. “Goodnight, buddy. It’ll be better in the morning.”

Peter fell asleep hoping that he was right.

\--

He was in the middle of his Physics I homework when his phone buzzed. He blinked a little as the brightness of the screen left a pulsing imprint on his vision. He’d been so engrossed with the scrawling questions that he hadn’t even realized the sun had set.

He flipped on a lamp and read the text with a grin.

TS: How’s Big Boy school going?

Peter giggled, shifting in his too-hard desk chair.

PP: it’s okay

TS: Just okay, huh?

His eyes flickered to the stacks of textbooks and graph paper scattered over his desk and the nearby floor.

PP: stressful

_And lonely._

TS: Just think about what it’s like for the non-geniuses. I shudder at the thought.

PP: we’ve been over this, everyone here’s a genius

TS: And we’ve been over my counterargument as well: I’d bet everything I’ve got that not a single one of them is as brilliant as you.

He swallowed past the lump in his throat. He couldn’t tell if his smile was bitter or fond.

PP: please don’t bet on me, it’s a bad business decision

TS: I’m always betting on you, kid.

He stared at the text until the words blurred out with tears.

\--

“Is your homework done?”

Peter rolled his eyes, flopping his head back against his pillow and setting his book aside.

“Yes, Mister Stark.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, Mister Stark.”

“Good.” Peter’s hearing picked up the chaotic sound of voices in the background of the call. “I’m shopping for furniture with Pepper and I’m suffering.”

“Uh, okay?”

“Don’t ‘uh, okay?’ me, young man. This is serious.”

Something about the casualness of the conversation made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. “Is it?”

“ _So_ serious.” There was a shuffle as Tony switched the phone to his other ear. “This is some twisted form of abuse, Peter. It can’t be legal, I’m sure of it.”

He hugged his stuffed elephant close to his chest, setting his chin on the top of its head. “Sounds like you’ve got a good case. The Constitution has a clause that outlaws cruel and unusual punishment, y’know. I think it’s in the Eighth Amendment.”

“So they _are_ teaching you something in that fancy college of yours, huh?”

“They’re teaching me lots of things.”

“Good.” There was a clang, and then the sound of Tony’s muffled cursing. “Fuck. Shit. Honestly, just _fuck_ today.”

Peter paused, waiting for his mentor to finish grumbling, before speaking softly. “Are you okay, Mister Stark?”

A sigh, heavy and tired. “Frankly, kid, it’s boring as hell without you here. Don’t know how I got by before you. I haven’t heard two words of sense spoken together since you left.”

He laughed, loud enough that his hallmates could probably hear it. “Did you just quote Pride and Prejudice?”

“What did I say, Peter?” His mentor let out a dramatic groan. “Pepper made me watch the miniseries with her. Twice. It was _torture_.”

He knew that Tony didn’t mean it. He was using that special tone of voice that was one part pompous, three parts fond. “You love Pepper.”

“Of course I do, kid. But variety is the spice of life. And, well,” there was a pause, as if Tony wasn’t sure whether or not to vocalize his next words, “well, she’s not you.”

Peter swallowed underneath another crushing wave of homesickness. “I’ll be home for a weekend in October. And you and May are still coming for Family Weekend, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, kiddo.”

Peter believed him.

“I miss you all the time, y’know.”

Tony’s voice hardened in a way that meant he was trying to hide his vulnerability behind a mask. “Oi. Nope. Not allowed.”

“You just said-”

“See, I’m allowed to miss you. That’s fine. But you? You’re supposed to be having too much fun to miss me.”

He rolled over, stomach sloshing with too many emotions. God, he was tired. He’d known that college was a roller coaster, but he’d thought that he _liked_ roller coasters. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

Too much of anything, no matter how good, would tear you apart.

“That’s not how this works.”

He hadn’t meant for his voice to sound so pathetic.

“Oh, bud.” Peter could visualize Tony’s bravado deflating. “I know.”

Peter let another layer of vulnerability creep into his words. “I don’t know how any of this works.”

“And you didn’t know how to connect the circuitry on the Iron Man suit until you did it, right? Same thing. You’ll do it, and you’ll learn as you go.”

“I’m not sure I _want_ to learn.”

“That’s the fear talking, not Peter.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it just so happens that I’m an expert in Peter Parker. Second best in my field, actually.”

He closed his eyes, tried to find answers behind the lids. “Is the first one May?”

“Obviously.”

He didn’t find answers. In the end, he wasn’t sure they existed. At least, not in a form he could recognize without the filter of hindsight.

\--

He lived for his video chats with Tony.

He could put in his headphones, block out the creaks and yells and banging of his dorm, and pretend that his mentor was right there with him.

It made him feel a little less alone.

“There’s the spider-kid.” Tony’s voice lagged a little, but Peter let the grainy image of his face chase away some of the darkness. “You look good, kiddo.”

He smiled. “So do you.”

“Well, I do make sure to get my beauty rest.”

Peter scoffed at how ridiculous the statement was. Tony Stark, actually sleeping on healthy, regular schedule? Yeah right.

“Oi, what’s with the attitude?” Tony narrowed his eyes. “Maybe I don’t like this college version of Peter.”

_I’m not sure I do either, Mister Stark._

“I’ve always given you attitude.”

“True.” He clapped his hands. Even through the pixelated image, Peter could see the fondness in his eyes. “So, I hear from May that you’ve got a calendar. Not only that, but you’ve actually got things written on it. Now, I don’t peg May as a liar, but I do need to see this phenomenon for myself.”

The laugh was so genuine that it caught him by surprise. “Is it that hard to believe?”

“Peter Parker? The kid most likely to be so disorganized that he might stumble across a form of organization within the chaos? Yeah, buddy, pretty hard to believe.”

He carried his laptop over to the calendar and dutifully pointed his webcam at the wall. “See? Calendar. Organized.”

“I’m reeling.” His mentor’s voice was overflowing with amusement. “Next thing I know, you’ll be showing me a clean dorm room.”

He spun around, letting Tony see a swath of empty floor and closed drawers. “It _is_ clean.”

“Impossible. Who’s dorm room are you hiding in? That’s trespassing, kid.”

“Hey!” He oriented the laptop so that his face was back in view. “I clean my room every day.”

Tony put a hand over his forehead, as if he was feeling faint. “I’ll have to tell May. Our little boy is growing up.”

“Haha. You’re so funny.”

“I know I am.”  
Peter set the laptop back down on his desk and dropped his head back against the back of his chair. He felt a heaviness tug at his eyelids and gut in tandem. “Mhm.”

When he blinked his eyes open again, the humor in Tony’s voice had vanished. Instead, it was dripping with concern. “You better be getting enough sleep, buddy.”

“I am.” He sighed. “It’s just tiring. All of it.”  
“Yeah.” Peter could see Tony’s hand twitch, as if he was naturally going to reach out to comfort him before realizing that they were over 200 miles apart. “But let’s not talk about that, eh? We’re gonna talk about something fun.” He shifted in his seat, excitement obvious. “I’m working on a new project. It’s gonna be a long one, so I’m thinking of taking you on as a paid intern over the summer to help me with it. If you’d like that, of course.”

_Summer. Home._ “I’d love that.”

“Perfect! Wanna hear about it?”

“Obviously.”

“So it all kind of began with the new housing unit for the nanotech…”

\--

“Hey, kid. How’re you doing?”

“I’m okay.” He glanced down at the picture on his screen, nose scrunching up with a wet sniffle. “A year ago today we were at that concert. Remember? Y-You bought me like six hotdogs and we didn’t get home until 2 am.”

Tony’s voice was indulgent. Somehow, that just made Peter feel worse. “I remember.”

“We were too wired to go to bed once we got home so we watched the Weather Channel until I fell asleep on top of you.” He took a shaky breath. “You must’ve fallen asleep later too, because I woke up to Pepper putting a blanket over us.”

“The red one, right?”

“Y-Yeah. The red one.” Every word ached on his tongue, in his jaw. The price of emotion, of memory. “We were too lazy to move all morning. Pepper brought us breakfast there and we watched a documentary on Helen Jewett and you kept covering my ears whenever they mentioned sex and it was so… so…”

_It was so un-lonely. So connected. So the opposite of what I’m feeling right now. What I’ve been feeling every second of every day since you left me here._

“Peter?” Tony’s voice was soft and loving and so much like home that it made a new batch of tears well up in his eyes. “I miss you too, buddy.”

His emotions seesawed, tipping precariously from sobs to composure. His lip quivered as he scrunched his eyes shut. “I-I wanna come home.”

“I know.” Tony’s breath huffed against the receiver. Peter imagined him pressing a palm against his forehead, probably sitting in his favorite chair in the lab, the phone pressed close to his face. “I know, Pete. But you’ll be okay. You’re doing so well.”

“I hate it.”

“I know that, too. It’s par for the course.”

“I hate that I hate it.” He gave up trying to hold in the tears. He just muffled the first sob against his elbow. “I miss May. I miss Ned. I miss Delmar’s. They have a deli in one of the dining halls, but it isn’t nearly as good and I can’t even eat there because it just makes me so homesick.” He sniffled. “I miss you. I miss you so much that it _hurts_. I miss you and all the bots and Pepper and Rhodey and I miss movie night and ice cream day and doing my homework in your lab and I just… I just _miss you_.”

“Oh, Peter.” If he was home, if Tony was here, Peter knew that his mentor would be brushing a curl out of his face. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in a barren dorm room, suffocating in its air of impermanence, trying to finish a paint-by-numbers life without any instructions. And right now, all he wanted was for someone to comfort him, for someone to hold him and tell him that it was going to be okay.

But no one was there, and the lack of touch cut down to his bones.

“Just so you know, kiddo,” his attention snapped back to Tony, “I miss all of that, too.”

“Then why am I _here_?” He felt like screaming. He felt like stumbling out of his room and down the road and not stopping until the skyline of _home_ fell into view. “Why am I doing this?”

“Because you want to.” Tony adjusted his grip, and the movement translated through the receiver with a muted scrape. “Because you know that this is something you have to do.”

He felt petulant. Nothing like the adult he was supposed to be. In fact, he’d never felt younger. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“If that’s how you feel then you can come home, bud. You know May and I will be proud either way.”

He stopped. He thought about it. He really, really thought about it. For a minute, he let himself linger at the mouth of the easy way out.

Then, he slowly shook his head.

“No. I-I need to do this.” A swallow. “Or, at least, I need to try.”

He could taste Tony’s pride. “I know you think you’re failing, but you’re not. I’m so proud of you, buddy.”

“I just wish it was easier, sometimes.” Peter clenched a fist. “It’s stupid. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, don’t we have a rule about apologizing when it’s unnecessary?” The words were a reprimand without weight. “It’s not stupid. I wish it was easier for you, too.” He let out a sigh. “I spend most of my life reminding myself not to solve all of your problems for you, if I’m being honest.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” A breath. “It’ll be okay, Peter. I promise.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“It’s because it’s true.”

_I guess that clichés become clichés for a reason._

“You’re right.” He forced belief into his chest, into his throat, into his words. “You’re right. I’m gonna… I’m gonna do this.”

Everything about Tony’s voice sounded like a smile. “Yeah, you are.”

_I will._


End file.
